With the rising amount of digital audio/video content being made available (such as movies, TV series, live events, documentaries), reflected in the increasing number of content sources (TV channels, VOD catalogue, internet stores) and content purchase methods available (pay-per-view, subscription, catch-up TV, pull and push VOD) and further compounded by the emergence of new content types (like user generated content), consumers now need very efficient tools to help them find content that fits with their preferences and expectations.
To satisfy these consumers' needs, operators offering content through their managed networks not only have to augment and improve the volume of their content on offer, but they must also follow up with an increase in the volume of metadata related to the content. The metadata must be rich enough to represent all consumers' needs in terms of tastes and expectations and therefore be translatable for use as content search criteria. Indeed, in order to help the user to find content, metadata has to describe the various aspects of content that the consumer is likely to use as search criteria. As a consequence, the management of content metadata by operators is becoming much more complex all along the value chain: from acquisition to rendering, through metadata storage, handling, examination, understanding, and delivery.
The present invention is applicable in the domain of audio/video content distribution in the context of broadcast content or video-on-demand content (VOD). In both cases the operator prepares a catalogue of available content, i.e. content assets, in advance. In the case of broadcast content this will take the form of a schedule for the broadcast of the content while in the case of VOD this will be a list of content assets in stock or otherwise accessible for viewing. In either case the list or the schedule are directly associated with the content. Along with the list of assets or the broadcast schedule, the operator also provides content metadata. The metadata is therefore associated with the content asset or with the content to be broadcast. The content metadata is also gathered in advance (i.e. before putting the corresponding content asset on-line or otherwise making it accessible or before the time advertised in the schedule for the broadcast of the corresponding content) . . . . Included in the meaning of gathering content metadata is the acquisition of metadata from third party metadata stores. Third parties may make use of the Internet to make available huge quantities of content metadata. It is possible therefore for an operator to expand upon content metadata currently available to him in relation to his assets or schedules by fetching more metadata from the Internet for use on top of the currently existing metadata.
Once acquired, metadata is stored in a database and associated in some way to the assets or scheduled events. The metadata is organised according to a number of meaningful fields such as description, contributor, origin among others. Standards such as “TV Anytime” for example may also be used for organising the metadata. Most often, metadata will be acquired in the format in which it will be delivered.
Once conveniently prepared, metadata can either be delivered with the content (i.e. embedded in VOD or broadcast streaming) or kept at back-end i.e. kept by the operator. The metadata may be directly accessible to the consumer for browsing, or filtered out in order to present consumer-personalized content information, or it may be made available for use by applications in charge of helping the consumer to find given content. Examples of such applications could be search tools or recommendation tools. In summary, the metadata could be used in browsing/exploring content, searching content or recommending content.
United States Patent Application Publication Number 2001/0047290A1 discloses a content management system primarily targeted for managing media accessible on the internet. The media is interlinked using hyperlinks and tags, which may therefore be interpreted as metadata. A measure of the degree of relevance of the hyperlinks or tags is carried out and the result is used to create further links between the media in the database. Furthermore the system inspects, for a particular user, a set of user-preferred tags and relates them to the media in the database. In this way the system can search relevant data for the user with a high level of success. Such systems are generally known in the state of the art and are used in technology providing recommendation functions.
United States Patent Application Publication Number 2006/0031217A1 discloses a method and a system for ontology-based classification of media content within a collection, involving acquiring content, associating classifiers with the content and arranging the classifiers in a hierarchical structure. The classifiers can be used to search through the collection. A confidence value for a classifier is attributed and may be modified by a boosting factor based on a correspondence between the confidence value and confidence values of ancestor classifiers in the hierarchical classification structure. By doing this a more accurate representation of the actual confidence that media content falls within the classification associated with the classifier is obtained. This method and system is therefore aimed at accurately classifying an existing collection.